The Hot Country E-Book

Robert Olen Butler

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 549

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller War correspondent Christopher Marlowe 'Kit' Cobb arrives in Vera Cruz, Mexico, to cover the country's civil war. A passionate believer in the power of a free press and the moral superiority of the United States, Kit is no mere observer. He assumes a false identity to pursue German diplomat Friedrich von Mensinger en route to a meeting with revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, and the correspondent soon finds himself up to his neck in political intrigue. Along the way he's nearly shot by a mysterious sniper, joins forces with a double agent and falls in love with a headstrong young Mexican woman who may be mixed up in the revolutionary plot.

Leseprobe

THE HOT COUNTRY

A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

1914: War correspondent Christopher Marlowe ‘Kit’ Cobb arrives in Vera Cruz, Mexico, to cover the country’s civil war. A passionate believer in the power of a free press. Kit is no mere observer. He assumes a false identity to pursue German diplomat Friedrich von Mensinger en route to a meeting with revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, and the correspondent soon finds himself up to his neck in political intrigue. Along the way he’s nearly shot by a mysterious sniper, joins forces with a double agent and falls in love with a headstrong young Mexican woman who may be mixed up in the revolutionary plot.

Christopher Marlowe Cobb will return inThe Star of Istanbul

Praise for The Hot Country

‘Exciting story...The Hot Countryis a thinking person’s historical thriller, the kind of exotic adventure that, in better days, would have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah’–Washington Post

‘high-spirited adventure.... great writing’–New York Times

‘Literate, funny, action-packed, vivid, and intriguing’–Historical Novel Society

‘A fine stylist, Butler renders the time and place in perfect detail’–Publishers Weekly

‘Butler writes thrilling battle scenes, cracking dialogue and evocative description, and the plot ofThe Hot Countrykeeps twisting to the very end’–Tampa Bay Times

‘Pancho Villa, fiery senoritas, and Germans up to no good – Butler is having fun inThe Hot Countryand readers will too. An intelligent entertainment with colourful history’–Joseph Canon

‘a spirited and beautifully told tale of adventure and intrigue in the grand old style, rich in both insight and atmosphere. Going off to war with Kit Cobb is as bracing and fun as it used to be in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, or in Perez-Reverte’s Captain Alatriste novels. And the best part is that there are more to come. Saddle up’ –Dan Fesperman, Hammett award-winning author ofThe Double Game

ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

Robert Olen Butleris the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of sixteen novels, six story collections and a book on the creative process,From Where You Dream. A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. In 2013 he won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

robertolenbutler.com

Also by Robert Olen Butler

The Alleys of Eden

Sun Dogs

Countrymen of Bones

On Distant Ground Wabash

The Deuce

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

They Whisper

Tabloid Dreams

The Deep Green Sea

Mr. Spaceman

Fair Warning

Had a Good Time

From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

(Janet Burroway, editor)

Severance

Intercourse

Hell

Weegee Stories

A Small Hotel

Dedictation

For OttoPenzler, who inspired and encouraged this book and the ones that will inevitably follow. And for Bradford Morrow, my dear friend and literary brother,who brought Otto into my writing life.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

1

Bunky Millerman caught me from behind on the first day of Woody Wilson’s little escapade in Vera Cruz. Bunky and his Kodak and I had gone down south of the border a couple of weeks earlier for thePost Expressand the whole syndicate. I’d been promised an interview with the tin-pot General Huerta who was running the country. He had his hands full with Zapata and Villa and Carranza, and by the time I got there,el Presidentewas no longer in a mood to see the American press. I was ready to beat it back north, but then the Muse of Reporters shucked off her diaphanous gown for me and made the local commandant in Tampico, on the Gulf coast, go a little mad. He grabbed a squad of our Navy Bluejackets who were ashore for gasoline and showers and marched them through the street as Mexican prisoners. That first madness passed quick and our boys were let go right away, but old Woodrow had worked himself up. He demanded certain kinds of apologies and protocols, which the stiff-necked Huerta wouldn’t give. Everybody started talking about war. Then I got wind of a German munitions ship heading for Vera Cruz, and while the other papers were still picking at bones in the capital, I hopped a train over the mountains and into thetierra caliente. I arrived in Vera Cruz, which was the hot country all right, a god-forsaken port town in a desolate sandy plain with a fierce, hot northern wind. But I figured I’d be Johnny-on-the-spot.

Anyways. That Bunky Millerman photo of me. I saw it for the second time some weeks later, after a bit of derring-do that gave me what I expected to be the scoop of a lifetime and a king beat on the other boys, who were all stuck in Vera Cruz sparring with the Army cen-sors over an invasion that clearly wasn’t moving out of town. Seemed there’d been something else going on all this time, right under our noses. When I’d finally gotten the real dope on that and figured out how to cable it to the home office uncensored, I got an immediate wire back from my editorin chief, Clyde Fetter. He called it a knockout of a story—and it was—the only problem being his wire ended with a “but” as big as Sophie Tucker’s wagging away at me: Before he could go to press with this, he needed me back in Chicago in person, as soon as I could get there.

So I found myself in Clyde’s Michigan Avenue office at thePost Expresson a hot afternoon in May. His eighth-floor windowswere thrown open to the lake but it wasn’t giving usnada,not enough breeze even to nudge the match flame he’d just struck up. What he didn’t do was cross his feet up on the corner of his desk for what has become the traditional cigar-lighting at the start of one of our big-story sit-downs. I was still attuned to ominous signs after all I’d been through lately, so I didn’t miss the significance of his feet being on the floor. He had more on his mind than figuring out the front-page layout and how to ragtime up our leads. Whatever he really had on his mind was awkward enough that he went cross-eyed focusing on the end of the cigar in his mouth, and he wasn’t saying a word.

“So,” I said. “Is our man going to file for the Senate race?” By which I meant Paul Maccabee Griswold, the Hearst of Hyde Park, Clyde’s and my überboss. He had till June 1 to file for the primary and he was getting itchy for power of a different sort. I intended the remark simply as small talk to loosen Clyde up.

“Word is,” he said, without so much as glancing from the end of his cigar.

And then I saw the postcard on the cork wall behind his desk. It was surrounded by clippings and Brownie shots and news copy, but it jumped off the wall at me. Clyde was still stalling, so I circled around him and looked close.

It was me all right. Bunky had snapped me from behind as I was walking along one of the streets just off thezócalo,which was the main square they call thePlaza de Armas,and there’d been a gun battle. Bunky had it printed up on a postcard-back for me, and I sent it off to Clyde. I’d inked an arrow pointing to a tiny, unrecognizable figure way up the street standing with a bunch of other locals. In the foreground I was striding past a leather goods shop. The pavement was wide and glaring from the sun. Even from behind I had the look of a war correspondent. There but not there. Unafraid of the battle and floating along just a little above it all. Not in the manner of Richard Harding Davis, who came down for another syndicate after the action got started and who wore evening clothes every night at his table in theportales. Not like Jack Lon-don either, who was in town looking as if he’d hopped a freight from the Klondike. I had a razor press in my dark trousers and my white shirt was fresh. We boys of the Fourth Estate love our image and our woodchop-per’s feel for words. It’s an image you like your editors tohave of you, and so I sent this card, even though by the time I did, I’d already begun to learn a thing or two I wouldn’t put in a story for thePost Expressor anybody else. Did the lesson of those first few days help lead me to the big story? Maybe. I’d have to think that over.

But first I pulled the card off the wall and turned it over. I’d scrawled inpencil, “After the battle notice the pretty Señorita’s in this photo. The one in white does my laundry.” I drew my thumb over the words, compulsively noticing the dangle of the first phrase, which was meant like a headline. I should have put a full stop. “After the battle.” And I’ve made“Señorita’s” singular possessive, capitalizing it like a proper name. Maybe this was more than sloppiness in a hasty, self-serving scrawl on a postcard. It was, in fact, true that I had no interest in the other girls. Just in whatever it was that this particular señorita had inside her. Luisa Morales.

Clyde took a guess at where my mind was. “Good thing we’ve got a copy desk,” he said, a puff of his relit cigar floating past me.

“If I were you I wouldn’t trust a reporter who bothered to figure out apostrophes anyway,” I said. But I wasn’t looking at him. Now that I had him small-talking, I didn’t care. Something more absorbing was going on.

I turned the card over once more and I looked at Luisa, dressed in white, far away. And I was falling into it again, the lesson I was about to learn in the photo seemingly lost on me. Because what I wasnotlooking at in the picture or even while standing there in Clyde’s office, really, were the two dead bodies I’d just walked past, still pretty much merely an arm’s length away. A couple of snipers, also in white, dead on the pavement. That’s what they paid us for, Davis and London and me and all the rest of the boys. To take that in and keep focused. I got the head count and I worked out the politics of it, and I could write the smear of theirblood, their sprawled limbs, their peasant sandals without a second glance. I could fill cable blanks one after the other with that kind of stuff while parked in a wisp of sea breeze in theportalesover a glass ofmezcal. If I got stuck finding the right phrase for the folks on Lake Shore Drive or Division Street or Michigan Avenue, I just tapped a spoon on my saucer and along came a refill and inspiration, delivered by anhombrewho might have ended up on the pavement the next morning showing the bottoms of his sandals.

“So what became of your señorita, do you suppose?” Clyde said. I looked over my shoulder at him. He’d drawn his craggy moon of a face out of his collar and had it angled a little like he’d just sprung a horsewhip of a question on a dirty politician.

I ruffled around in my head trying to think if at some point I’d suggested any connection to him between the one in white and the one in black. It felt like a year ago I’d sent him that story, though it was only a few weeks. But I felt certain I hadn’t. “Did I get drunk and send a telegram I don’t remember?” I said.

“Nah,” Clyde said. “Call it a newsman’s intuition.”

I shrugged and looked away from him again. But I wasn’t talking. And that shrug was just for show. It was all still there inside me. The whole story.

2

She more or less came with the rooms I rented in a house just off thezócalo. I’d barely thrown my valise on the bed and wiped the sweat off my brow when she peeked her head in at the door, which I’d failed to close allthe way. These two big dark eyes and a high forehead from her Spanish grandfather or whoever. “Señor?” she said.

“Come in. As long as you’re not one of Huerta’s assassins,” I said in Spanish, which I’m pretty good at. I figured that accounted for the smile she gave me.

“No problem, señor,” she said. She swung the door open wide now, and I saw a straw basket behind her, waiting. “I’ll take your dirty things,” she said.

“Well, there was this time with Roosevelt in San Juan . . .” I said, though it was under my breath, really, andI let it trail off, just an easy private joke when I was roughed up from travel and needing a drink.

But right off she said. “You keep that, señor. Some things I can’t wash away.” She did this matter-of-factly, shrugging her thin shoulders a little.

“Of course,” I said. “It’s probably a priest I need.”

“The ones in Mexico won’t do you much good,” she said.

She kept surprising me, and this time I didn’t have a response. I just looked at her, thinking what a swell girl, and I was probably showing it in my face.

Her face stayed blank as a tortilla, and after a moment, she said. “Your clothes.”

My hand went of its own accord to the top button on my shirt. “Please, señor,” she said, her voice full of weary patience, and she pointed to my bag.

I gave her some things to wash.

“I’m Christopher Cobb,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“I’m just the local girl who does your laundry,” she said, and I still couldn’t read anything in her face, to see if she was flirting or really trying to put me off.

I said, “You’ve advised me to keep away from your priests even though I’m plenty dirty. You’re already more than a laundry girl.”

She laughed. “That was not for your sake. I just hate the priests.”

“That’s swell,” I said. Swell enough that I’d said it in English, and I spoke some equivalent in Spanish for her.

She hesitated a moment more and finally said, “Luisa Morales,” and then she went out without another word, not even an adios.

And I stood there staring at the door she’d left open at exactly the same angle she’d found it when she came in. And I’ll be damned if I wasn’t disappointed because I couldn’t explain to her about my name. Christopher Cobb is how I sign my stories but Christopher Marlowe Cobb is my full name and my editors right along have all wanted me to use thewhole moniker in my byline, but I find all those three-named news boys—the William Howard Russells and the Richard Harding Davises and the George Bronson Reas—and all the rest—and the host of magazine scribblers and the novelists with three names are just as bad—I think they all make themselves sound pompous and full of self-importance. And it’s not as if I don’t like the long version of me: My mother gave me the name, after all, when she first laid me newborn in a steamer trunk backstage at the Pelican Theatre in New Orleans and she went on to become one of the great and beautiful stars of the American stage—the eminent, the estimable, the inimitable IsabelCobb—and Christopher Marlowe was her favorite, though he didn’t understand women and probably didn’t like them, because he never wrote anything like a true heroine in any of his plays, and maybe that tells you something about my mother’s taste in men. She did love her Shakespeare as well, and she played his women, comic and tragic, to worldwide acclaim, but she named me Christopher Marlowe and she called me Kit like they called him, and Kit it is. I just keep the three names packed away in a steamer trunk, and if Luisa Morales had only stayeda moment longer, I would have told her to call me “Kit”— everyone close to me does—though no doubt that would have meant nothing whatsoever to her, and if I’d actually explained all that about my name the day I met her, she would have thought me a madman. Which is what I was thinking about myself. I was a madman to want to explain all this to a Mexican washer girl.

3

So I beat it down to the docks, where I found out the location at sea of the German ship, theYpiranga,said to be carrying fifteen million rounds of ammunition. Then I stopped at the telegraph office where Clyde had wired me. It seemed that half the Great White Fleet was also headed in my general direction, including the troopshipPrairie,the battleshipUtah,and Admiral Fletcher’s flagship, theFlorida.Things were getting interesting, but for now all there was to do was wait. So I ended up at a cantina I reconnoitered near my rooms.

Not that thoughts of Luisa Morales came back to me while I was drinking, not directly. I soaked up a few fingers of a bottle ofmezcaland sweated a lot at a table in the rear of the cantina with my back to the wall and I watched the shadows of thezopilotesheaving past, the mangy black vultures that seemed to be in the city’s official employ to remove carrion from the streets, and I thought mostly about what crybabies Thomas Woodrow Wilson and his paunchy windbag of a secretary of state William Jennings Bryan turned out to be. They com-plained about the dictator right next door in Mexico and his likely complicity in the murder of the previous president—not to mention his threat to American business—but whenthey finally found an excuse to invade the country, they grabbed twelve square miles and stopped and sat on their butts. Out of what Wilsonian moral principle? The one that let him invade in the first place but only a toehold’s worth. What principle was that, exactly? I lifted my glass to Teddy Roosevelt and toasted his big stick.

I’d done that same thing in Corpus Christi a couple of weeks earlier with a guy who knew how it would all happen. I was waiting in Corpus for my expense money to show up at a local bank. I found a saloon with a swingingdoor down by the docks, but the spot I always like at the back wall had a gaunthombrein a black shirt with a stuffedbandoleraand beat-up black Stetson sitting in it. He saw me look at him. Coming in, I’d passed a couple of Johnnies rolling in the dirt outside gouging each other’s eyes and I didn’t want to add to the mood, so I was ready to just veer off to the rail. But the guy in the Stetson flipped up his chin,and the other chair at the table scooted itself open for me, a thing he did right slick, timed with the chin flip, like the toe of his boot had been poised to invite the first likely-looking drinking buddy.

So I found myself with Bob Smith and a bottle of whiskey. He was gaunt, all right, but all muscle and gristle, of an indeterminate age, old enough to have been through quite a lot of serious trouble but young enough not to have lost a bit off his punch. He had eyes the brown you’d expect of mountain-lion shit. He didn’t like being called a “soldier of fortune,” if you please, he was aninsurrectofrom the old school, ’cause his granddaddy had stirred things up long before him, down in Nicaragua, and his daddy had added to some trouble, too, somewhere amongst the downtrodden of Colombia before all the stink about the canal, so this was an old family profession to him, and as far as personal names were concerned, I was to address him by how he was known to others of his kind, which was to say, “Tallahassee Slim.”

I said, “There’s a bunch of you Slims in all this mess, it seems.”

He agreed happily, listing a few. Cheyenne and Silent and San Antonio. Dynamite and Death Valley and Deadeye. He and Birdman Slim had even spent time together with Villa last fall. Birdman was ap-parently Villa’s one-man aeroplane regiment, having brought his spit-and-baling-wired Wright Model B down to recon and drop homemade bombs for Pancho. The plane got plugged by ground fire over Ojinaga and crashed, but Birdman Slim walked away pretty much unscathed from the wreck and beat it back up to El Paso to lick his wounds. Tallahas-see Slim, after some legitimate accomplishments as a cavalry officer in the field, was appointed a major fund-raiser for Villa. He told me this simply, with an ironic shrug, not seeming to feel it was a violation of hisinsurrectotradition. But after a stint in this capacity—mostly involving the railways and particularly those trains carrying government bullion or arms but not refusing the personal contributions of private citizens who happened to be on board—Tallahassee Slim had also come north to regroup himself and dally with some white women before heading south again. He and I traded war stories and I got around to complaining about Wilson, who I took to be a lily liver.

“Not exactly,” Tallahassee Slim said, leaning a little across the table and rustling the ammunition strappedto his chest. “At least a lily liver has a straightforward position. This guy isn’t one thing or another. You hear how the man talks? Teddy would put his pistol on the table and call it a pistol. Old Woody sneaks his out and calls it the Bible. He preaches about upholding civilized values, stabilizing governments, giving the Mexicans or the Filipinos or whoever a fine, peaceful, democratic life. Not to mention protecting American interests, which means the oilmen and the railroad men and so forth. And as for the locals, you simply try and persuade the bad old boys who happen to be running a country we’reinterested in to retire to the countryside. Problem is, thecojonesthat got those fellas into power in the first place will never let them walk away. So when it comes down to it, Woody’s going to go to war. Over a chaw of tobacco, too, when it’s time. Mark my words.”

So we drank to Teddy Roosevelt, and I did mark those words. One thing I’d learned filling cable blanks from varioustierras calientefor a few years already was to listen to anybody with live ammunition who called himself “Slim.”

And I also lifted my glass that first afternoon in Vera Cruz to Tallahassee Slim. A couple of times. I drankmezcaltill it was too hot to stay upright and I decided to follow the example of those who actually lived with the infernal bluster ofel Norteand I took a nap.

4

When I got back to my rooms I found my shirts and my dark trousers folded neatly at the foot of my bed, which led me to notice a quiet babble of female voices somewhere nearby.

I stepped out into the courtyard and Luisa and two other señoritas were over under a banana tree, hugging the shade and talking low. So she saw me looking at her and she rose and stepped into the sunlight, crossing to me but taking her time.

“Señor?” she said as she approached. “Your shirts are clean, yes? Your pants are pressed just right?”

Even in the United States of America, when a girl who works in a shop or a beanery or who does laundry, for a good example, gets a little forward, you take it in a different way than you would with a girl of money and fancy family who you meet somewhere official. I’ve had a few blue-blood girls say some pretty cheeky things in my presence in this day and age. But the shirt-washing Señorita Luisa Morales who stood before me, as beautiful as her face was—with maybe even some granddaddy straight from Castile—she was sure nosangre azul,and she was already plenty forward with me, and she didn’t have to get up and come over and ask about my laundry based on me just looking in her direction. So given all this, it was natural to think she was ready to spend some private time together.

I speak pretty good Spanish, but my vocabulary has some gaps. The few things I know to say in this situation I picked up in cantinas and aburdelor two, and though I figured she was ready for the substance of those words, I was not feeling comfortable with the tone of them. She had a thing about her that I wasn’t understanding. So trying to go around another way, I said, “Why don’t you come on in andwe check out the crease in my pants.”

She put on a face I couldn’t decode. Then I said, “I speak softly and carry a big stick.”

Maybe Teddy loses something in translation. Or maybe not. She was gone before I could draw another breath. I remembered those big eyes going narrow just before she vanished, an afterimage like the pop of a newsman’s flash.

Right off, I had a surprisingly strong regret at this. Not just the missed opportunity. The whole breakdown. But I still had toomuchmezcalin me and the afternoon was too hot, and so I took my siesta.

By the time I saw my señorita again, it was two days later, the German ship had arrived, and so had the U.S. Navy. Bunky and I went down to the docks first thing and the German ship was lying to, just inside the breakwater, with the American fleet gathered half a mile farther out. There didn’t seem to be any serious action out there and it was only a few blocks inland to thePlaza de Armas. So I figured I had time to write a dispatch to Clyde.

I took what I’d decided would be my usual table in theportalesand even had a couple of beers. Bunky was off on his own with his Kodak snapping what struck him as interesting, and he swung back to me and gave me a nod now and then. He was a former war cor-respondent himself, a hell of a good one, but he was taking his shots with film these days instead of words, which was a damn shame. Still, he could take a good one.

So we were well into the morning and Bunky had just checked in and was about to go off again when the local Mexican general, a guy named Maass—born a Mex but with German blood and blond, up-right hair—marched a battalion’s worth of government troops into the Plaza. I figured it was getting time for the off-loading of theYpiranga. I was also the object of some nasty looks from a major on horseback as I finished my beer while the locals were discreetly heading for cover.

Bunky and I beat it back down to the docks, and it had already begun. I counted ten whaleboats coming in, full of American Ma-rines, which I later learned were from thePrairie. No sign behind me, up the boulevard, of Maass sending his troops to meet them. I had my notebook and pencil stub in hand and Bunky took off to find his camera angles.

It all went fast and easy for our boys and forme during the next hour or so. The Marines, who numbered about two hundred, were followed by almost the same number of Bluejackets from theFlorida,and they brought the admiral’s stars and stripes with them. We took the Custom House without a shot being fired.

I was still waiting for the Mexicans to come down and put up a fight, but there was no sign of them. Meanwhile, a bunch of locals were gathering in the street to watch. A peon in a serape and sombrero called out “Viva Mexico” and threw a rock, and even before the rock clattered to the cobblestoned street twenty yards from a couple ofriflemen, he was hightailing it away. The riflemen just gave him a look and the crowd guffawed and it was all turning into a vaudeville skit.

Then a detachment of Marines clad in khaki and wrapped with ammunition started to march through the street along the railway yards. They turned like they were heading for the Plaza. I signaled Bunky and took off after them. They were going down the center of the cobbled street, thezopiloteshop-skipping out of their way and giv-ing them a look over their shoulders like these guys could be lunch. I was hustling hard and gaining on the Marines and they were passing storefronts and balconied houses. Mexicans were strung along the street watching like it was the Fourth of July.

Just as I was about to overtake the captain in charge of the de-tachment, I saw Luisa. She was up ahead with some other señoritas nearby but she was standing by herself and she was dressed in white and she was standing stiff with her chin lifted just a little. But I had a man’s business to do first. I was up with the captain and I slowed to his pace and he gave me a quick, suspicious look when I first came up, but then he saw I was American.

“Captain,” I said, and I lifted my arm to point up ahead. “You’ve got about two hundred Mexican soldiers waiting for you in the Plaza.”

He gave me a quick nod of thanks and turned his face to halt his detachment, and at that moment I looked toward Luisa, who was just about even with me but I passed her with my next step and my next, and I slowed down, even as the detachment was coming to a halt, and it registered on me that Luisa had been watching me closely and I felt a good little thing about having her attention but at that moment the gunfire started. The crack of a rifle and another and a double crack and the Marines were all shifting away and I spun around, knowing at once that the rifles were up above, that the Mexicans were on the roofs, and Luisa had her face lifted to see and I leaped forward one stride and another and my arms opened and I caught her up, Luisa Morales, I swept her up inmy arms and carried her forward and she was impossibly light and I pressed us both into the alcove of a bakery shop, the smell of corn tortilla all around us.

“Stay down,” I said, and I put my body between the street and her and I realized I’d spoken in English. “They’re firing from the roofs,” I said in Spanish.“Don’t move.”

She didn’t. But she said, “They’re not shooting at me.”

“Anyone can get hit.”

“They’re shooting at you,” she said.

“I’m all right,” I said. “This is old news to me.”

A rifle round flitted past my ear—I could feel the zip of air on me—and it took a bite out of the wall of the alcove. I twisted a little to look into the street—I was missing the action—this was news happen-ing all around me—and as soon as I did, I felt Luisa slip out past me and she was moving quick along the store line, heading away. Another round chunked close in the wall and there was nothing I could do about my spunky señorita and I pressed back into the alcove to stay alive for the afternoon.

5

It wasn’t a bad spot, actually, to watch the skirmish. The Marines did a quick job of sharpshooting the Mexicans, some of them falling to the pavement below and others going down on the roofs or beating a fast retreat.

Then it was over. I stepped out of the alcove. Bunky was com-ing up from the direction of the docks and he was doing his camera work. I stayed with the Marines while they regrouped and tended to a couple of wounded. The Mexicans on the roofs turned out to be poor shots andthe Marine captain thought they weren’t regular troops. Meanwhile a scout came up and said Maass’s men had moved out of the Plaza and off to the west. Later in the day the Mexicans would go over the hills on the western outskirts of town to flank the battalion of Marines in the railway yards and along theCalle de Montesinosby the American Consulate. The boys on theFloridawould see what they were doing and break them up with the ship’s guns and Maassand his men would all run away.

But for now the Marines mustered up and marched off toward the Plaza and I crossed onto the wide pavement in the sunlight and sauntered in the same direction. I was starting to shape a lead para-graph in my head. I passed a couple of dead Mexicans. I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies. My business is getting stories. You’re dead, and your story’s over.

Then up ahead I noticed a figure in white. I was very glad to see her. She’d gotten through the bullets okay. I headed for Luisa and she saw mecoming. I was still not within talking distance and she said something to the girl next to her and moved off. I stopped. The girl Luisa spoke to looked at me with a blank face and then looked away. I’m not a masher. A little dense sometimes, maybe. I was ready to leave Luisa Morales entirely alone, if that’s what she wanted.

Early the next morning, long before the sunrise, I woke abruptly to the scratch of a match. I turned my face and saw a candlewick flare up and glide to the night table, but before I could quite comprehend it all, the business end of a pistol barrel was resting coldly on my left temple. Floating in the candlelight was Luisa’s face.

“You were working for them,” she said.

“Who?”

“The American invaders.”

I was reluctant to get into a political argument with a laundry girl who had a pistol pointed at my head. I chose my words carefully. “I’m a newsman,” I said.

“I saw you with the American officer, directing him.”

The pistol was getting heavier. If her weapon was cocked and her bearing in on me was unconscious, her tired hand could do something it didn’t necessarily intend. I tried not to think about that. There were some other pressing issues. For one thing, her attitudes weren’t add-ing up. I needed to talk to her about this, but I had to make the point carefully. I didn’t remind her ofher hatred of Mexican priests; they were all I could think of in her culture that might speak against her pulling the trigger. But I brought up the logical next thing.

“I don’t think you’re a supporter of General Huerta,” I said.

“I hate Huerta. Do you take me for a fool?” She nudged my head with the pistol for emphasis.

“No. Of course not. But these Americans. They’re here to help free Mexico of Huerta. That’s all.”

“Did you see who was dead in the streets?” she said.

Lying sweating in my bed, a pistol muzzle to my temple, I was still unable to set aside the impulse to deal in either the literal facts or the political rhetoric that are the goods of my trade. Rhetoric would be dangerous, and I was short on facts. I hadn’t looked closely enough to identify the bodies. I wasn’t saying anything, and I felt an agitation growing in Luisa. I felt it in the faint, nibbly restlessness of the steel against my head.

“Did you see who was dead in the streets?” she said again, very low, nearly a whisper.

“No,” I said.

“Mexicans,” she said. And she cocked the hammer.

My breath caught hard in my chest and I waited. She waited too. Weighing my Americanness, I supposed. Weighing my life. Charting a path for herself.

Then thehammer uncocked and clicked softly back into place. The muzzle drew off my skin. The candle flame vanished in a puff of her breath and I lay very still as she slipped through the dark and out of the room and out of the life she’d left for me.

6

Not that my lead paragraphs over the next couple of days were any dif-ferent from what they would have been. A handful of cadets and civilians with some fatally bigcojonessniped our boys from the Naval Academy near the waterfront and got broadsided into the next life by the five-inch guns of theChesterand theSan Francisco. The Marines came ashore and pummeled their way from house to house and secured the city. We had a nifty American flag raising ceremony at thePalacio Municipaland sud-denly our fighting boys were all done up in clean dress whites. The local officials refused to come back and govern their city, and Vera Cruz was put under U.S. martial law with us vowing to be benevolent as hell. A 7:30 evening curfew went into effect, but we lifted it within forty-eight hours. And all the while, theYpirangajust satout there in the harbor. A German ship full of arms for Mexico with the Kaiser rattling his saber in Europe. I tried to hire a launch and go out to her once things settled down, but the Bluejackets intercepted me before we could even cast off. TheYpirangawas unapproachable, but she was still hanging around, and the other newshounds seemed unconcerned, expecting our Great White Fleet to finally just escort her out to sea and on her way back to the Fatherland. But if we were not going to roughride our way to Mexico City, then she still felt like the best story brewing.

One potential story did come along, however, that got Luisa talk-ing again, low and angry inside my head, even as I eventually wrote it strictly by the standards ofa wrongly-assaulted, badly-misunderstood-but-still-proudly-waving Old Glory. It started to shape up soon after the last American refugee train out of Mexico City finally made it to Vera Cruz, the one safe town in the country for Americans. And there were about five hundred of our countrymen jammed into it, the most visible ones in the capital, the bankers and the major shopkeepers and most of the embassy people. The bankers who weren’t on the train were in jail and the shops had been looted and the embassy had been stoned and torched, and all of Mexico was suddenly united in its hatred for America and Americans. Even our ambassador and his wife snuck into town and ended up comfy in Admiral Mayo’s quarters on theMinnesota.

Not that any of that hatred dared to be openly shown around Vera Cruz. Nothing like an occupying army to straighten things out. Though the local Mexican government boys were lying low, after a couple more days people were free to come and go, and the shops and markets andburdelesreopened pretty quick. The band shell in the Plaza even got back to nightly business with a German band playing American tunes. The well-off Mexican couples returned to the ballrooms at the bigger hotels and they promenaded to the Cubandanzon. I thoughtabout Luisa several more times, but what she taught me grew a little fuzzy. Not that any lesson you learn is simple. The first Mexican president of the revolution, the one before Huerta, a former big landowner, foresaw his revolutionary future in a Ouija board. And the peasants who rose up on his behalf did so because they were convinced Halley’s Comet had been a sign from God to change their government.

And maybe Luisa did affect the idle track of my thoughts once more, near the end of that first week, as I sat at my table in theportalesof theHotel Diligencias. I was facing thezócalo,and I was in nodding distance of Richard Harding Davis, who was sipping a good wine in his evening clothes as the sun was bloodily vanishing beyond the mountains to the west. There was still a bouquet of death in the air from the unclaimed Mexican bodies. A Marine swaggered by with adobe dust on his clothes from pounding down the walls of people’s houses in his search-and-clear frenzy. Though I admired the man, I did find myself being a little critical, thinking that probably going through the doors would have worked for our boys just as well. And I realized that a good many of these leathernecks were hard-ass combat veterans from what William McKinley, Jr., had called our “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines fifteen years ago. McKinley had the foresight to have no middle name at all, but it did himnadain the end.

Bunky abruptly appeared and he nodded his thickly-silvered head at me, once, emphatically, as economical and dramatic with his hellos as he was with his news leads in his heyday. He moved the second chair around to the side so he could watch the street, as I was doing. He laid his Kodak 3A folding camera in the center of the table and it was still unfolded, with its red bellows stretched out straight from the black case.

I said to Bunky, “You know that thing looks likea dog’s dick when he’s got your leg on his mind.”

He was too much of a gentleman and too much in love with his Kodak to act as if he heard me.

“Abigdog,” I said.

He reached to the camera and collapsed the bellows into the case and snapped it shut. “Down, Rover,” he said, but very quiet, almost to himself.

I’ve always liked Bunky. He was B. F. Millerman for nearly four decades, mostly when thePostwas thePostand theExpresswas theExpressand Bunky was the latter’s man at the front lines in the Franco-Prussian War and in Cuba with Teddy and in South Africa when the Brits and the Boers went at it. He did good work. I read his every word in theExpressin the spring of ’98 when I was fifteen years old and Mama was dazzling Chicago as Cleopatra. B. F. Millerman was my Cap Anson, my Cy Young, and backstage at the Lyric Theater I charged up San Juan Hill with B. F. and Teddy. Bernard Francis. I finally wheedled the full moniker out of him a couple of years ago when he was drunk, and he was properly offended that I did so. Bunky took up the camera when he’d finally had a bellyfull of governments and their armies censoring and manipulating the news.

“What are we doing here, Kit?” Bunky said.

“You and me?” I said.

“You and me and all the rest of us red-white-and-blues.”

“If we all head on up the road to Mexico City . . .”

“We won’t.”

The German musicians were tuning up across the street, in the band shell behind the almond trees at the center of the Plaza, and the tuba was struggling to find a B.

“I made up a postcard for you,” Bunky said, and he took out the picture of me and Luisa and the dead locals.

I looked at it. “I should send this to Clyde,” I said.

And we heard a gunshot off to the right, downLa Avenida de la Independencia. The shot was nearby but oddly muffled, so I figured it wason the far side ofLa Parroquía,the great, gray,el Norte-blasted par-ish church, which also fronted thezócaloand took up the next block south along theavenida.

“Sniper?” I said.

A second shot. It sounded like a Mauser.

“Or a drunk,” Bunky said.

“It’s too early for the drunks to start shooting and there’s barely enough light for a sniper.”

Bunky shrugged.

“But still,” I said, concluding the debate with myself, “it’s enough.” I listened for another shot.There was only silence.

I stood up. “I think I’ll take a stroll to see if he got his man.” Bunky put his hand on his Kodak.

“This enough light for you?” I said.

He took his hand off the camera. “I’ll hold the table,” he said. I headed south onIndependencia,making it more than a stroll. I hustled along pretty quick, waiting for more gunfire, though there was still just silence. I was starting to doubt that it was a sniper. But the news had slowed down pretty dramatically in Vera Cruz and I could use a little exercise.

7

There was a high-voiced racket all around, thezopilotesin their twilight wrangling over their spots on the roof edges and on the bell tower and even on the high cross itself, where they would settle down to sleep. But when I turned the far corner, atCalle de Vicario,and faced along the street at the south side of the church, some different, agitated voices joined the din. Fifty yards ahead was a little gaggle of women hovering around something or someone on the pavement that I couldn’t see. I strode on, expecting, briefly, to find a plugged fellowgringo,probably in uniform. But even before I arrived, I’d adjusted that expectation. The Veracruzanas wouldn’t be making over an American like this.

I gently elbowed the women into opening a space for me, and I was right about the victim. It was not an American. It was a Mexican priest ina black cassock. He was lying flat on his back on the pave-ment, his right arm straight up in the air, and he was grasping his right wrist hard. The palm of his hand had a major bloody hole blown in it and it had already sent the priest into shock. Or, to take up the likely point of view of everyone on the street but me, it had sent him into a state of religious ecstasy: He was staring at the hole and talking to it, saying over and over, “I’m martyred. I’m martyred. By the wounds of Christ I’m martyred.”

I almost pointed out the obvious to everyone assembled: His stigmata was actually from a rifle slug. But I figured most of these assembled señoras already knew that. I looked over my shoulder and up to the roof of the two-story row building across the street, where the sniper must have fired his two shots. If he was still up there, I fig-ured I’d be next. But I didn’t see anybody. Two shots to the priest and that was it, it seemed. I looked back at thepadre.He was a slick-haired, corpulent, middle-aged man, and he was still clutching and waving his woundedhand and proclaiming his Christ-like suffering. The woman next to me said it was a miracle. I thought she was talking to herself and about the bleeding palm. But she was talking to me and she was about to answer the question that was now in my mind. She nudged me and bent to the priest and lifted the massive gold cross that hung on a chain around his neck, even as the priest yammered on, unaware of her.

The cross had been plugged right at the intersection of the up-right and the crossbar. This was heavy gold plate. The Mauser slug had buried itself in the metal and it no doubt knocked him on his ass, probably right after the shot to his hand. Under his cassock he’d have another memento that I was sure he’d figure out how to exploit: the image of the crucifix imprinted on his chest in black and blue. The cross saved the priest’s life, but it wasn’t a miracle. The guy on the roof clearly knew what he was doing: sending a message. If this shooter wanted the priest dead, the priest would be dead.

I was taking all this in pretty quick, but meanwhile the priest was doing more than claiming martyrdom. He was bleeding. I knelt beside him. He had a hemp rope wrapped around his cassock as a belt. I undid it and pulled it off him. “Did someone go to find a doctor?” I asked the ladies.

“Yes. Yes, señor,” a couple of them said.

“We need to stop the bleeding,” I said, and I took hold of his lifted arm. He did not resist. He turned his face to me as I wrapped the rope around his forearm above the wrist.

“Did you see who shot you?” I asked him.

He just stared at me.

I cinched the rope tight and laid the arm across his chest. He kept it there and seemed ready just to pass out for a while.

I looked at the womengathered around me, seeing in their eyes that moment you learn to sense, the moment of the most trust you’re going to get from people you want to get information out of. “Did any of you see the shooter?” I asked.

I got a little chorus ofNo, señorwith a trailingNo vi nadaor two. They’d all seen nothing. As they spoke, I scanned the dark, round faces wrapped in theirrebozos,and I noticed one woman, indeterminately old but older than the rest, who didn’t say a word. As I looked her in her eyes, they shifted away. She was the one who knew something.

I needed to make another gesture. I looked at the priest, whose head had lolled to the side on the pavement. “We should make him comfortable,” I said. “May I have something for his head?”

One of the women crossed herself and unwrapped herrebozoand rolled it and kneeled next to me. She lifted the priest’s head very gently and slid the cloth beneath it. Though I was interested in the tenderness of her gesture and how she might have always longed to touch him like this, I put that aside, and instead, I looked up at the silent woman, who was watching. She felt my eyes on her and she looked at me.

“What did you see?” I asked her, with just a little bit of firmness, catching her by surprise.

“No la vi,” she said, and I could see in my periphery another woman’s face turn sharply in the older woman’s direction.

The older woman seemed to catch herself. “No lo vi,” she said. And then, “No vi nada.”“I did not see anything” is where she’d ended up. And just before: “I did not see him.” But the first thing she said, the unedited thing, the true thing, was: “I did not see her.” Her.

“The sniper was a woman?”I asked, looking hard at the older woman.

“No, señor,” she said, lying in every little way a reporter is trained to see, by a blinking of the eyes and a slight fidgeting of the shoulders and a pinching of the voice. “I do not know who shot.”

I looked at the other faces. “Was the sniper a woman?” I asked them all.

They weren’t talking, even if they knew.

I’d done all I could do for the wounded man and this was all I was going to get from the women. I rose and said good night to them and they were polite and a couple of them were nervous, and I moved off.

And moving slowly back north onLa Avenida de la Independencia,along the face of the church, I had the obvious crazy thought. She hated the Mexican priests. She had a thing to do before she got out of town. She was a pretty damn good shot, which wouldn’t surprise me. It was Luisa. That was an intriguing little page-four-or-so story I didn’t intend to file.

Overhead the great bronze bells in thecampanariostruck the half hour—six-thirty—and almost instantly up ahead, from the belfry of thePalacio Municipal,a tenor of bells echoed the church’s bass. I could use a drink. I was trying to put Luisa out of my mind once again, but she was resisting. I tried harder: It might not even have been her; it probably wasn’t her. Even if the sniper were a woman, anurbansol-dadera,Luisa was a washer girl. Where could she have learned to be a crack shot? But there was a simple answer to that: She could have learned the basics from a dad or a brother, and the rest you’ve either got or you don’t. And I walked faster.

By the time I reached the edge of thezócalo,the band had started playing. I hesitated a moment under the coconut palms at the edge of the Plaza. My table in theportaleswas calling me, but I looked down the path to the band shell. Not only was a German ship sitting in the harbor with sixteen thousand cases of ammunition for Huerta or whoever else, there were upward of fifty thousand Germans in Mexico, many thousands fresh from the Fatherland and carrying the Kaiser’s stamp on their passports and operating the banks that held a big chunk of Mexico’s international debt, all this while Herr Wilhelm was clearly working himself up for some kind of war in Europe. So a German band playing “Give My Regards to Broadway” in akioskoin Vera Cruz while under American occupation flared my journalist’s nostrils.

8

The benches along the path were full of older locals, segregated by sex, some full of men with their sombreros in their laps, others full of women with theirrebozosgathered no farther than their shoulders, their heads also bare to the cooling twilight. The local boys were mashing from the edges of the band shell as the local girls promenaded before them in their best skirts dyed in colorsof the sunset that had just now faded or the Vera Cruz sky at noon, the girls in pairs with their arms around each other’s waists, which was more than just girlfriendship. It was a taunting thing directed at the boys as well, which I knew from me looking at the prettiest of them and finding myself envying the arm of her friend.

And there were groups of strolling American Army boys in clean khakis, smart enough not to look at the local baby-dolls too close, briefed well by their officers to behave around the girls’ Latin-tempered future husbands. The horny among our boys knew where to go later, a shortride along the trolley line for the professionals. So half a dozen of our boys were gathering as I approached and trying unsuccessfully but loudly to harmonize, “Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square.”

I moved around the shell a bit to watch the Germans mak-ing music. They all had Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches, thick over the lips with sharp upturns at each end. They all were dressed in white band uniforms with crimson trim and epaulets and brass buttons. The biggest of the musicians was pounding the upright bass drum. The cornets were carrying the tune and the trombones were sliding their sounds in and out, pointing up the melody, and I scanned the faces of these men who might otherwise have been training to fight the French or the Serbs or theBrits or whoever else. As I did, with the faces seeming as similar to each other as soldiers under their gold hat brims, a trim but solid-looking man sitting on the near end of the front row moved his eyes to me. He was blowing an alto horn, its bell bent to point upward. He didn’t look away and I nodded at him and he looked forward again.

He seemed to have recognized me. My name was certainly fa-miliar in the American press—and my stories were even syndicated occasionally into German and Spanish—but my face was not familiar. There’d been some magazine photos of me, but only a very few. I wasn’t like the celebrity-seeking Davis. He could be recognized on any number of big-city street corners, or perhaps even from a band shell in a plaza in Vera Cruz, Mexico. But not me. Maybe I was wrong about the moment of recognition. Or maybe I just needed that drink. I looked close enough at the guy with the alto horn to find him later if I needed a German for a quote, and I headed back down the path. By the time I got to theavenida,the band had finished with George M. Cohan and had started upLa Cucaracha,though more in the rhythm of a polka than a Mexican folk dance, the two pieces in sequence making up a lunatic music-hall overture for this night and for this half-assed invasion and for international politics in general.

I drifted away, back toward the hotel.

Working the city beat in Chicago as a cub reporter made me very familiar with the street lowlifes, all the grafters and prowlers, the hoisters and heavyweights, the crawlers and the gonifs. Made me never take a step in public without my full attention. So I usually knew when there was somebody else’s hand in my pocket. And as soon as I passed out of the light from the bandstand and into a dark stretch of the path, I saw a small, deeply shadowed shape out of the corner of my eye. It slipped very neatly and quietly up to me—if I hadn’t seen it, Iwouldn’t have known it was there—and suddenly a hand was in my right front pants pocket.